Recent years have seen a rapid proliferation in location-based marketing. Indeed, it is now common for businesses, marketers, and various individuals to provide marketing messages to populations of users within a defined proximity and/or at specific locations. Utilizing location-based marketing at specific locations often results in more effectively serving relevant content to target populations of users having an interest in goods or services associated with the marketing content.
Conventional location-based marketing systems often cater to users within a proximity of a point of interest. For example, many conventional systems define a virtual boundary around a point of interest (e.g., a restaurant, retail store, hotel) and provide a marketing message to a user within the virtual boundary (e.g., within a fixed radius). The marketing message may include coupons, special offers, or other communications that encourage users to visit the point of interest or other nearby location and purchase goods or services. Simply identifying points of interest and communicating with nearby users, however, often fails to capture a relevant audience of users. For example, targeting users within a fixed proximity of a point of interest often over-targets a nearby population, targets a small population, or targets a population of users that have already decided on a particular purchase or activity prior to arriving within the proximity of the point of interest. As a result, conventional location-based marketing systems often fail to effectively capture a relevant audience.
Some conventional systems for location-based marketing overcome various inefficiencies by targeting densely populated areas of users. For example, many conventional systems define virtual boundaries around densely populated areas to ensure that a large number of people receive a given targeted message. While targeting densely populated areas generally captures more users and may provide a temporary boost for businesses, sending targeted messages to densely populated areas often over-targets populations and desensitizes users from heeding subsequent marketing messages. As a result, many users may uninstall an application or otherwise unsubscribe from receiving marketing messages, thus decreasing long-term effectiveness of location-based marketing. Additionally, targeting densely populated areas often results in greater costs for businesses or individuals that pay for a delivery of a certain number of targeted messages.
These and other problems exist with regard to sending location-based messages to populations of users.